Caryn James

The director, Joe Johnston, paces this adventure to suit the film's tone. It is swift and smooth, never wild or raucous.

Ju Dou is an intellectually and artistically brave film. Asking for dramatic power and psychological depth as well may be expecting too much.

Prison has a generic, low-budget name, and for once you can judge a movie by its title. This prison-drama-meets-ghost-story turns out to be an object lesson in how cheaply and badly a film can be made.

A film that assumes it's up to the job of dealing with life and death and love, but is not even up to dealing with lobsters.

Casper is not the kind of smartly written movie that works on children's and adult levels at once. But with its lively pace, smashing visual tricks and one of the cutest heroes on screen, it is an engaging fantasy for very small children.

Martin Short can do anything, it seems, except find the right movies to star in.

It's commercially calculated to have something for everyone - suspense, humor, even a bounty hunter from the krites' planet who poses as a rock star. Unfortunately, the film doesn't have the humor or the budget to match any of these goals.

Elm Street 4' does have an endless onslaught of astonishing, often grotesque special effects .Mr. Harlin only has to keep things moving, which he does with restless camera work, swirling high above Freddy and his victims. Freddy, who says I am eternal, seems to be a self-fulfilling prophecy, immune to directors and scripts.

[Mr. Gerima's] film is ambitious in its depiction of slavery and accomplished in its visual command.

This paranoid fantasy is so resonant that it makes The Net an enjoyably creepy thriller, even though Irwin Winkler belongs to the nothing-is-too-obvious school of directing.

Both Mr. Danson and Mr. Culkin make the film's predictable ending far more effective than it might have been. They are warm without being sappy. It's too bad that the audience, parents and children, are likely to have grown restless long before then.

The best that can be said for the film is that it leaves Ernest behind now and then to focus on Santa, who is played by Douglas Seale with sweetness, sincerity and an amazing amount of dignity, considering his surroundings.

The other miracle is that the two stars of It Could Happen to You keep it sailing over a script that is often as predictable and flat as the movie's new title.

An uninspired circus film for children.

Deadly Friend is stylish and sardonic enough to offer horror fans some knowing laughs and a pleasant relief from shrieking.

For all its clever updatings, stylish action and witty escapism, Licence to Kill is still a little too much by the book. Mr. Dalton is perfectly at home as an angry Bond, and as a romantic lead and as an action hero, but he never seems to blend any two of those qualities at once.

The script, which he wrote with Alain Le Henry, is as confusing and tiresome as the direction. What is meant to be a touching, comic relationship between Marx and Johnny is simply flat.

Fortunately, Candyman isn't powerful enough to do much harm. The credits are more intriguing than the film.

There are some grotesquely stylish and scary moments in Phantasm II, the sequel to a 1979 film that Don Coscarelli made as a precocious 25-year-old. Unfortunately, these episdoes seem to take as long to arrive as the sequel did.

No one expects realism from a movie called Teen Wolf Too... still, the film makers could pretend to know what college is like, might try to liven up the kindly werewolf formula.

The film features someone who walks like Jackie Mason, talks like Jackie Mason, does everything except make people laugh like Jackie Mason.

Though it is meant to be whimsical and touching, the film's style is leaden, and its story has more danger than excitement.

If Nobody's Fool is often heartbreaking in its sense of loss, it is also hopeful in the strength of its emotions and the sheer beauty of its performances.

While Mr. Destiny is not technically a remake of anything, it's hard to find a glimmer of originality, much less wit or emotion.

Its detailed fantasy world, including a dark turn-of-the-century mining town and candy-colored futuristic space bikes, is as alluring as any live-action film. Yet this two-hour story about a lost princess, a flying island and space pirates is liable to strain the patience of adults and the attention spans of children.

Anyone looking for a true sense of his importance in the history of rock-and-roll will be let down by Great Balls of Fire. But though the film may skimp on the truth, it is loaded with terrific music and outrageous fun.

Comprised of so many derivative bits and pieces that it's not surprising the movie has too little narrative coherence or momentum to keep us going, and no characters we care about enough to root for.

Style is almost everything here, and it's a tough call whether the star is handsomer than the sets.